Working hard and enjoying every minute of it.

I have not blogged in almost a year, I am a total slacker. But, I really want to share what I have been doing and what my team and I have learned, so in the coming months, I will be getting into painstaking detail about some concepts and implementations that I think have really helped my team to deliver value.

Where am I ?

About a year ago I left my role as Chief Architect for the largest .Net ecommerce site, www.dell.com , I found my role there ended up spending more time teaching the fundamentals to teams and management, when I really wanted to spend my time moving quickly and getting things done. So I left for a start up; QuarterSpot. My role there is CTO, and I am responsible for all of the technology decisions, which is great, because if something is not working, I am accountable and empowered to change it.  QuarterSpot is a peer to peer financial company that specializes in lending money to small businesses. I feel great about our mission which is to help small businesses get money when banks will not lend money or the process is so time consuming that by the time they get approved the small business losses the opportunity they needed the money for. (QuarterSpot CEO on Small Business Lending Panel at LendIt Conference)

What am I doing?

My team is responsible for building all of the technology to enable our business. Since the peer to peer space is a newer business model, this means we need to move fast and innovate, which is what the promise of Agile was all about. Since we are in the financial space, quality is of the highest importance, so this is where my experience in extreme programming (XP) practices really pays off. So, mix this together with Continuous Delivery and we have all the components to deliver software at a rapid pace in a business that needs to rely on technology innovations to stay ahead of its competition.

We are building the websites and backend systems to be able to process and service loans, utilizing machine learning to analyze our customers so we can analyze and discover better algorithm to serve the business. We are able to use whatever tools makes the most sense for us to move quickly and it is so much fun to deploy code to production on a frequent basis.

We push code to production frequently, which means I am usually exhausted after a full day of work. This is very rewarding. It also takes a lot of mental energy to stay diligent about quality and make sure each feature is complete.

Topics that I will be covering in upcoming posts

• What is continuous delivery and how is it different from continuous deployment?
• The importance of keeping code out of your UI / Web frameworks.
• Using the Command Query Separationpattern
• Transparency in your development and production support process, utilizing dashboard
• Utilizing cloud infrastructure to move quickly.
• Automate everything.
• How my preferred development stack has changed since 2009.
• Importance of a consistent architecture / application implementation.
• Keeping your  architectural concept count low.
• Optimizing performance when it maters and not before.
• Machine Learning and statically typed models.

If any of these topics are interesting to you, let me know in the comments and I will get to those posts first.